Tracking down the tugboat that trashed Trinidad and Tobago

Hi everyone, 

I’ve got something a little bit different for you this week. In homage to the upcoming Paris Olympics, I’m passing The Spark torch on to Charley Maher, Social Media Editor at the investigative organisation Bellingcat. Charley was a fellow at TBIJ many moons ago, so I know you’re in good hands. I’ll be back at the end, but for now, Charley, over to you.

When a submerged vessel appeared off the coast of Tobago, leaking oil into the Caribbean ocean and onto beaches, many people were rightly angered and confused. Where did this ship come from? Where was its crew? And who was to blame for such damage to a vital natural resource?

I spoke to Logan Williams, Bellingcat researcher, about the answers a group of online investigators eventually surfaced.

“A few days after the oil spill happened, it hit international papers. And every headline for the story used the phrase ‘mystery ship’…” said Logan. “To me the mystery ship was intriguing. It is a phrase that implies that there is more to be found.”

Luckily for Logan, shipping is very conducive to open-source investigation because there’s so much data that’s collected by marine tracking sites, satellite imagery and even ship spotters. 

~ Lucy again! You may remember a few editions back I talked about open-source intelligence, or OSINT for short. In simple terms, this means gathering, evaluating and analysing publicly available online data… everything from social media to government reports. Bellingcat are experts in OSINT ~

Authorities in Trinidad and Tobago were struggling to identify the vessel that was now leaking oil across miles of coastline. It had capsized offshore on 7 February with no visible crew or owners in sight. Dive teams and an autonomous submersible had found a name for the vessel – “Gulfstream” – but had been unable to locate an International Maritime Organization (IMO) registration number that would conclusively identify it.

Logan organised a group of volunteers and researchers to investigate. Quickly they found a photo on a website for ship spotters that indicated that the vessel submerged might be a barge, a type of boat that has to be powered by another vessel. If this was true, then the authorities might be looking for the people responsible for two vessels, not one.

How did they know this? The team spotted that the vessel in the photo had “pigeonholes” (foot holes forming a ladder) on the side. Self-powered ships don't have these – but uncrewed barges do, to allow people to get onto the vessel from the water.

This theory was later confirmed when we identified online a barge named Gulfstream, associated with a tugboat named Solo Creed. In photos, the tug had been painted with an IMO registration number, the barge had not.

After the investigation was published, Bellingcat researchers were interviewed on national television about the findings. And others took notice.

“Once we got it out there into the public, it started opening up even more collaborations and other open-source investigators, like the team at Tanker Trackers, who track shipments of crude oil,” said Logan. As other groups found and posted more information, he said, the Bellingcat team was able to use this information in subsequent articles.

Then, the Trinidad and Tobago Guardian, one of the region's most popular newspapers, became a collaborator. Soon, we were able to identify the likely owners of the tugboat that pulled the barge. We unearthed documents – validated by the Zanzibar Maritime Authority – that linked it to a Panamanian firm that specialises in the transport of oil from Venezuela.

In May, the missing tugboat turned up – in Angola. It was seized by the Angolan army for breaching its claimed offshore oil security perimeter. The tug’s name appeared to have been repainted to just “SC”, however the IMO number remained unchanged.

The information we uncovered was key in holding those responsible to account. While our work was independent, it was used by the International Oil Pollution Compensation Funds, which announced in May that it would be providing Trinidad and Tobago with financial compensation for the oil disaster. The cost of the clean-up was estimated to be in the range of USD $23.5m. 

The Funds said in its report: “The majority of information provided in this document was obtained from an independent agency comprising researchers, investigators and citizen journalists utilising open-source information.”

Another effect Logan has noticed is “more public awareness, especially in the Caribbean, about the kind of spectre of unregulated ships transporting hazardous commodities around for islands”. He’s been speaking a lot with Caribbean journalists since the stories came out. “It's something that people are thinking about and talking about in a way that they weren't before.”

As Logan has so clearly described, some problems require a team to solve them.

It’s something we’ve known since our very inception. Before we became a not-for-profit publication, we were strangers connecting through the internet. Collective action and collaboration was – and remains – the backbone of everything Bellingcat does.

So what better now than to hear from one of our community members about how he got involved in tracking the mystery ship. All aboard…

“Logan had posted an article on the Bellingcat Discord server about this mystery ship that had washed up and caused an oil spill. And he identified a ship named Gulfstream. He’d asked how we could verify the size of the wreck. Because, as it turns out, the authorities hadn't gotten a very accurate measurement of the ship.

I realised that my architecture training could be useful, so I offered to help. Using some architecture software, I made what's called a photogrammetric model of the ship, which takes a ton of photos and turns them into a 3D model. And using that I can pull a dimension off of it. This model turned out to be vital to the investigation as it allowed the researchers to have an idea of how the vessel might be positioned within the water.

​​Early on, I’d say that my involvement was smaller than everyone else’s. I was new to shipping and the open-source tools involved in tracking it, but I got up to speed fairly quickly. 

For the first article, my contribution was finding some images here and there of the boat and helping with the 3D modelling. By the second article, I was helping to make maps and finding satellite images of the barge and tracking it. 

By the third, I was pretty heavily into all of the ownership records, finding court records from Panama showing that the tugboat was sold for around $7,500 and that it was leaking before it had even left for its destination. I also found it had two previous incidents where it had had some kind of grounding or was lost at sea. For the fourth investigation, where we revealed the tug was in Angola, I got a byline.

I don't know anybody who is experienced in international shipping. But, online, in the Bellingcat Discord server, I can link up with all these people who know the technical details of it. I can link up with Logan, who is really good at the investigative side. There were other people from Bellingcat helping with the financials. All of our skills kind of combined to make this series of articles happen. I couldn’t have done this with my contacts alone.

I really enjoyed working on the story, and seeing the impact that it has had. I’m not obsessed with ships but there's definitely a lot more stories about shipping that I am now thinking about.

More broadly, I’m rethinking my career trajectory. I'm much more interested in going into investigative journalism and potentially open-source research work, and I’ve signed up to be one of Bellingcat’s formal volunteers.”

Learn more about Bellingcat’s volunteer community and Discord server.

Wow! What a fascinating peek behind the curtain of Bellingcat’s world. Thank you, Charley, Logan and Thomas for sharing your work.

As always, let me know if you enjoyed this edition. We hope to do more takeovers in the future, and I’d love to hear from you about who we could get in the hot seat.

Today is World Emoji Day, so there’s nothing left for me to say other than 👋👀📅